The new Minister for Migration, Johan Forssell (M), has indicated that return migration programs are an important issue for Sweden and that they will now be a priority.
The government is currently developing a proposal on how to facilitate the departure of additional migrants from the country. However, at this stage, it is not in a position to provide further details.
In October of last year, the government initiated an inquiry into the potential for return migration from Sweden. The inquiry aims to explore the possibility of providing financial assistance to more migrants who wish to return to their home countries. The report, submitted in August, respectfully proposed that immigrants who have become Swedish citizens should be able to apply for repatriation grants, and that those who have immigrated as relatives should also be able to apply for support.
However, the investigator, Joakim Ruist, acknowledged the challenge of identifying effective strategies to strongly encourage voluntary repatriation. He suggested that significantly increased grants might inadvertently have the opposite effect, potentially undermining the willingness to interact.
On Tuesday, Johan Forssell was appointed as the new minister for migration. Previously, he served as minister for development aid and foreign trade. He assumed the role from Maria Malmer Stenergard (M), who has been appointed as the new foreign minister, following Tobias Billström’s resignation.
Forssell says that the most important issue is to keep asylum-related immigration at a significantly lower level than today, but he is unable to provide an exact figure for the number of migrants who will be allowed to come to Sweden in the future.
– It is not possible to provide a specific figure at this time. What is important is that we avoid returning to the previous policy that placed Sweden in a challenging situation. Many people were affected by it, he tells Schibsted newspaper Aftonbladet.
SD looks to Denmark
The government is currently working on a new proposal regarding re-immigration, and Forssell points out that it is “an important issue for Sweden”, but that it is not possible to go into details about the proposal at the moment. However, he stresses the importance of ensuring that there are possibilities for re-immigration for those who do not want to stay in Sweden.
– People who have come to Sweden may feel that life has not turned out as they had planned, that they long to return to their home country but lack the finances or other things to do so, he says.
Although the report does not recommend increasing the grants, the Sweden Democrats still want to follow the example of Denmark, where repatriation grants can be as high as SEK 350,000 per person. In Sweden, repatriation grants are currently up to SEK 10,000 per person.
– We can see that we are going to increase this considerably, and it is also something that is stipulated in the Tidö agreement that this amount should be increased. We believe that the Danish level would probably be an appropriate amount, Ludvig Aspling, the Swedish Social Democratic Party’s migration policy spokesman, told the tax-funded SVT.
